David Adams Archive

Aruba Networks, which provided and maintained the wireless network for last week's Black Hat USA 2011 conference, today provided some interesting statistics around the network's use. Apple devices were most prevalent at 43.3 percent of all devices (28.4 percent alone for iOS iPad and iPhone, with another 14.9 percent running OS X). Linux users composed 35 percent of the total, while Windows users represented 21.8 percent. While the majority of attendees used the Black Hat PSK network, almost 200 attendees utilized the PEAP/EAP-TLS "secured" network. Aruba captured a huge amount of security events, the most interesting of which were IP spoofing, AP spoofing, Power save DoS attacks and Block ACK attacks. Talk about a hostile environment.

The beleaguered handset maker Nokia is setting itself up for what it hopes will be a lean and mean relaunch in the U.S. later this year: it has finally admitted that it will not launch its newest N9 device--the first and possibly only one based on the MeeGo platform--and that it plans to end sales of its Symbian-based devices as well as low-end Series 40 handsets, as it prepares for a generation of devices it is developing using Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform.

"According to a new report, there are as many as 6,000 references to MinWin in an internal Windows 8 client build. This may provide more clues and validation of Microsoft's virtualization plans for the coming operating system release."

Mona OS 0.3.4 has been released. Screenshots (1 | (2 | (3 | (4). Added Facebook application written in Scheme, Ported w3m text browser. Now you can tweet and check Gmail from Mona OS., Ported mg (Emacs clone), Kernel and core components become more stable and faster, New simple shell written in Scheme. They're considering porting webkit on the next release.

Market research analyst firm VisionMobile says Google's Android smartphone operating system isn't very open at all. Google's open-source chief Chris DiBona strongly disagrees.

A couple of days ago I read a blog post by Stephen Ramsay, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. In it, he mentions that he has all but abandoned the GUI and finds the command line to be "faster, easier to understand, easier to integrate, more scalable, more portable, more sustainable, more consistent, and many, many times more flexible than even the most well-thought-out graphical apps." I found this very thought-provoking, because, like Ramsay, I spend a lot of time thinking about "The Future of Computing," and I think that the CLI, an interface from the past, might have a place in the interface of the future.

In a blog post, John Luther, the Project Manager of Google's WebM Project, has announced that Skype now supports the VP8 codec. The VP8 support is already available for Windows users who are using Skype 5.5. VP8 will be used to encode and decode the Skype video call if both the caller and receiver have clients that support the codec.

Debian developer Robert Millan talks about recent improvements with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD in the past few weeks.

Mozilla Firefox has been listening to recent memory complains, and as a side effect tested the browser's scalability to the extreme with memshrink's improvements. The results are shocking: For 150 tabs open using the test script, Firefox nightly takes 6 min 14 on the test system, uses 2GB and stays responsive. For the same test, Chrome takes 28 min 55 and is unusable during loading. An optimized version of the script has been made for Chrome as an attempt to work-around Chrome's limitations and got an improved loading time of 27 min 58, while using 5GB of memory.

Some highlights: PC-BSD 9 supports multiple DEs (GNOME2/XFCE4/LXDE) instead of being KDE4 only desktop, new revised PBI system that allows sharing of files and libraries between applications for reduced disk space, new AppCafe to allow easy browsing, installing and managing applications in PC-BSD system. Also the PC-BSD Control Panel has and one-stop access to a variety of system-configuration options.

Linus Torvalds piped up in the comments of a Google+ posting by Linux kernel hacker Dave Jones to air his true feelings about Gnome 3: "it's not that I have rendering problems with gnome3 (although I do have those too), it's that the user experience of Gnome3 even without rendering problems is unacceptable." People care what Linus thinks, and when he ditched KDE for Gnome a couple of years ago, people took note. Now he's using Xfce.

Even though most games wont run natively on Ubuntu there is still a sizeable number that run flawlessly on it thanks to the almighty Wine. The Wine app database lists a few games that run flawlessly on Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution for that matter and assigns a rating for them based on precious metals.

A new Trojan horse app has emerged to target Android devices, and this one's particularly creepy. The app records a user's phone calls and then uploads them to a remote server. The app was revealed Tuesday by security researcher Dinesh Venkatesan on the Security Advisor Research Blog, published by CA Technologies, now known as Total Defense. While this particular Trojan doesn't appear to be a threat in the wild--at least not for North American users--it's a good reminder of the growing threat of mobile malware.

This week Apple finally lit up its cloud-based service for developers, letting some of us take a sneak peek at the new service.